The Blue Church

DEATH NOTICES: The Question Mark died late Monday. While his family history is shrouded in mystery, we know he was born ca. 1650, just in time to contribute to that great quest for ideas in the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment.

We’ve seen that wisdom is not a quick fix or formula, not even God whispering the next steps in our ear. We’ve renounced complacency, and committed to the Map and Compass.

Where were we? Oh, yes. Confronting complacency. I had made the mistake of mindlessly trusting my smart phone, and, to mix metaphors, discovered that someone had moved my cheese!

But technology is only a problem when we allow it to lull us into a false sense of security. That’s when we stop paying attention and enter the complacency zone, the habitat of fools (Proverbs 1:32).

Did you read the book, Who Moved My Cheese? Published over twenty years ago, it’s a tiny volume, a modern fable with relevance today.

The four characters discover that the cheese they’ve come to rely on is no longer there.

GPS is great when it is working. But that day, it wasn’t. It was hot, I was lost, and wherever I was, there was no phone signal to be found. And then the phone itself was going dead, battery drained. It was day three of a seven day bike trip to Pittsburgh, and all I knew was that I was still a good thirty miles from a cool shower and comfortable bed.

Or, Why did God author a book rather than produce a movie?

To say that we live in a visual age is an understatement. Movies are displacing novels, and even novels are being read on screens which double as movie viewers. Technology is amazing.

Even God’s choicest servants can become disillusioned and depressed over circumstances. As with David when pursued by Saul (1 Samuel 27:1), Job in his severe trial (Job 3:1), and John the Baptist in prison (Matthew 11:2, 3), it happened even to the powerful prophet Elijah.

Journalist Ted Koppel once challenged an audience to “Consider this paradox: Almost everything that is publicly said these days is recorded. Almost nothing of what is said is worth remembering.”

If that was the case thirty five years ago, how much more today.

I first heard those words decades ago, but they still ring in my ears. Not because they are clever, or even because they are true, but because they are so very biblical.

Change takes us by surprise. And that is not the happy surprise of Christmas morning or the unexpected raise in pay. It is the surprise of shock that warns us intuitively that WE may need to change.